The Support Environment and Automatic Character Extraction from Rubbing Images of Oracle Bones Inscriptions

Abstract

Oracle bone inscriptions (OBIs) are the character which are used in the ancient Chinese dynasty more than 3000 years old. Deciphering OBIs is very important for the study of ancient China, Kanji history and so on. Hence, various computer based methods are proposed for OBIs recognition recently. However, these methods are limited on the OBIs character should be extraction extracted from the OBIs rubbing image previously. In this paper, we investigate an automatic OBIs character extraction method and develop a support environment for various parameters decision. We apply global binarization, opening processing, and local binarization to damaged oracle bone images at first. Next, character string regions are extracted using oval Gaussian filter. Then, the regions are segmented by histogram. At last, we evaluated this character extraction method using F-measure.